How A Police Barricade Becomes A DIY Bench

For a city with so many people, New York has a severe shortage of comfortable places to sit and enjoy the outdoors for free. That’s why this man in Spanish Harlem took matters into his own hands, transforming a police barricade into a public bench.

It’s actually a pretty ingenious bit of engineering, the way the man — who claims to have invented the idea — uses the various parts of the barricade to secure it up against the fence.

Of course, the police aren’t too thrilled about their property being reused, even if it’s just for sitting out in the shade on a hot day. The man says he is regularly rousted by NYPD, but that doesn’t seem to stop him from doing it again.

is this guy a “person of color”? I didn’t read the full article on the link. Is he actually the guy in the photo?

Also ‘It’s actually a pretty ingenious bit of engineering” doesn’t really have the same tone as the “articulate” thing. I think the comment on the engineering has to do with the item alone and not the person doing it. The “these people” thing refers to the rednecks on thereifixed it, people of non-color generally.

Because he’s sitting on a bench that he made out of a police barricade in front of the Projects in Spanish Harlem, and apparently does this “regularly.”

We call it ghetto-rigging around these parts. And I bet you ten bucks that if you went up to him and said, “That’s a damn fine ghetto-bench,” he’d laugh and not be offended. You shouldn’t have to be offended by proxy for him.

You turn the A-frame pieces upside down and insert through the bars. Take one cross piece and lay it horizontally to form the seat. The other cross piece is lifted OVER the fence and placed as you see in the picture. When you sit down, the A-frame leg pulls the cross piece tighter against the fence and stabilizes the bench.

It actually looks like two barricades. Barricades have three parts. Two sets of legs, and a piece of long flat wood that locks into the top of the legs. He overturned the legs, stuck them through the ballisters of the fence, then slid the top piece of wood between the legs and the fence. He then put another piece of wood across where the legs come together. When you sit on it, the legs want to tilt forward, but the piece of wood stops them from sliding back through the fence.

I hope that made sense. It’s one of those things that’s easier to show than to write out.